This is some really hoity-toity TV.
I feel like a Damon Runyon character giving a Smithsonian
tour.
For St. Patrick’s Day, we’re watching Julie Harris in a 1955
live play for The United States Steel
Hour called “A Wind from the South.”
So let’s start with a little about Julie Harris, an actress
who can reasonably be called the first television star. Not the first star on
television, in the early days many personalities were making the great
migration from radio, and movie stars like Dick Powell and Barbara Stanwyck
were already noting the boost the new medium could give to their stalled
careers. Julie Harris, though, was the first personality forged in the public
consciousness by her appearances on TV.
As her career grew, she became one of the great figures of
American live theater, but for a white hot decade she was television and to the average member of the public who couldn’t
get to Broadway to see a play, television was how she was best known.
She played Joan of Arc in The Lark, Nora in A Doll’s
House, Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera,
Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina,
Mary Todd Lincoln in The Last of Mrs.
Lincoln, and basically a ton of powerful yet fragile women trapped in cages
of circumstance and society. She was effectively predicting the pending feminist
revolution with most of her early television performances, including the one
we’re looking at today.
